"Eventually I asked my father what Santa really looked like," she writes. "Was he brown, like us? Or was he really a white guy?"

"My father replied that Santa was every color," Harris continues. "Whatever house he visited, jolly old St. Nicholas magically turned into the likeness of the family that lived there."

Her essay eventually settles upon recommending a racially-neutral holiday figurehead: a penguin dressed in red and white. "People love penguins," she insists.

In other words, it's as if she wrote the piece intending to troll Fox News President Roger Ailes himself. And it worked.

The very notion of a black Santa apparently gave some Fox News producer an idea, of sorts: why not put a bunch of white people on television to defend Santa Claus's whiteness?

And so it was.

"By the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white, but this person is just arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa," Kelly explained, to what must be her rather small audience of children who spend time watching Fox News. "Santa is what he is. And just so you know, we are debating this because someone wrote about it, kids."

She went on to suggest that Harris must experience "real pain" by seeing a white Santa, and insisted that the Christian deity figure Jesus "was a white man too," calling this "verifiable fact," much like Santa's whiteness.

"I just want the kids watching to know that," she said. "My point is, how do you just revise in the middle of the legacy of the story and change Santa from white to black?"

By Wendell Berry

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion—put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry is a poet, farmer, and environmentalist in Kentucky. This poem, first published in 1973, is reprinted by permission of the author and appears in his “New Collected Poems” (Counterpoint).